Omega Ratio

Traditional investment performance benchmarks quantify how much investors could potentially lose, given the variance (or downside-variance) of the portfolio. These include the Sharpe Ratio and the Sortino Ratio, which generally favor investments with a lower downside risk.

The Omega Ratio can be modified so that it favors return distributions that are skewed to the right with a positive mean, and an exponentially decreasing left-tail. This penalizes dangerous asset behavior which can potentially exist as an edge case.

This Excel spreadsheet finds the investment weights that maximize the Omega Ratio of a portfolio. Under realistic conditions, this requires non-convex global optimizers – Excel’s optimizers are not robust enough. So consider the simplified problem in this spreadsheet as a learning…